Mechatronics - An Education Approach towards Product Engineering

This paper shows that Mechatronics is more than just combining mechanical, electrical and information processing elements. Although state of the art control engineering works from a systems point of view, it becomes evident that mechatronics design is much more than understanding interacting phenomena of the different building elements, transferring these phenomena into abstract models and manipulating control algorithms. Three distinguishing properties of mechatronic systems are addressed: the turn towards (consumer) end-products, the use of advanced in-situ technologies to build compact and smart products and the co-operative design approach, where all system building elements are subject to design freedom. From these properties the demand for a new engineering paradigm "design to market" is derived. In this sense mechatronics has to be understood more generally as a product engineering task. Some key educational elements for academic curricula are proposed to form beside sound domain specific knowledge also the required concurrent design and co-operative engineering skills as well as the skills to think in product and market categories. A sample implementation for a mechatronics curriculum at Technische Universität Dresden is given. 1. MECHATRONIC SYSTEMS Although mechatronics is already known for 30 years (Harashima, et.al. 1996), it is interesting to observe, that the mechatronics community is still looking today for a concise and comprehensive definition of what "mechatronics" really means. Starting from the first understanding as "synergistic use of integrated mechanical and electronic systems" the definitions have moved in the meantime as far as to the "synergetic integration of physical systems with information technology and complex decision making in the design, manufacture and operation of industrial products and processes" (Tomizuka, 2000). The latter definition shows clearly the turn of the scope of interest from technical systems towards products, with all their peculiarities concerning development, production, marketing as well as the handling qualities for their "operators". But nevertheless this most actual definition seems not at all appropriate, because it is too comprehensive in terms of target products. It does not state any restrictions to the addressed target "physical systems, industrial products and processes". This definition would allow also to include application areas like process engineering, power plants, and even telecommunication, navigation (e.g. road vehicle route guidance). These applications have "product properties" as mechatronic products have, but they are of completely different nature in terms of the involved physical systems. Therefore it is recommended for sake of clarity to restrict mechatronics clearly to those target applications where the mechanical building blocks of an "integrated mechanical, electronic, information processing system" play the major role. In this sense mechatronics can be defined in two stages: Mechatronic System := ... realizes a mechanical oriented product task (“generation of controlled motion under consideration of heterogeneous constraints”) ... consists of tightly coupled mechanical and other physical processes ... uses as realizing technologies highly integrated electro-mechanical components with distinct embedded real-time information processing and decision making functions Mechatronics := ... engineering approach which supports the development of mechatronic systems towards competitive products using scientific methods. 2. MECHATRONICS FROM THE